What are the first things you do when you have a computer problem? Probably restart the program or reboot the whole system for starters. If that doesn’t work, you can try to figure it out or ask for help. If those don’t work, you usually can find a work-around. For example, if you can’t print, you might put your file on a flash drive and use somebody else’s printer.
Though not necessarily very efficient, work-arounds get the job done, and we’ll put up with them for a while–sometimes a bit longer than we’d like to admit. But eventually we need to get our computer problems fixed.
Computer problems are almost always caused by the software. Yes, hard drives crash and power supplies fail, but the vast majority of breakdowns are caused by operating systems, drivers, applications, etc. But imagine if you didn’t know the software existed. Then work-arounds and swapping out components would seem like the only possible solutions. And over time the number of work-arounds would accumulate until they became unbearable and you want to swap out the whole computer, or in despair, give up on computing all together.
Well, we humans and all of our groups have software too. It’s called culture. Our art, language, knowledge, methods and rules (etiquettes, ethics, and laws). But we haven’t seen culture as software. Indeed, we’ve barely seen that we have software at all. And, of course, we don’t have any formalized methods of changing any of our culture, except the law. So we do work-arounds. Problem solving is all about devising and implementing work-arounds. But our work-arounds aren’t necessarily very efficient, they’re accumulating, and many or most of us are feeling some despair.
Reinventing culture is about illuminating culture as software, enabling us to get to the heart of our problems. The first example we’ll offer is to illuminate an obscure dusty piece of software called our ethics for citizenship. Reinventing these ethics will empower us personally, and enable us as a group to take on the world. We call this strategy Global Leadership. Click Next to read about global leadership. At some point you’ll be empowered by reading and commenting on More About Reinventing Culture.
Love the metaphor of culture as an operating system. Terence McKenna used this concept as well, and we use it for our approach to organizational culture in our consulting work (see http://inos.biz/site/why-inos )
Thanks, Philip. I use software as a metaphor a lot. Our goal is to move toward using it literally. I believe we can parse culture into code. I know this website is run by software, but I’m so far from understanding the code that I can’t change any of it. Others who know the code can do very powerful things. The purpose of the NCI is to illuminate the code of culture, allowing us to make safe, efficient, powerful change. Smiles.
Wow! Pretty ambitious, I’d say. Just take this metaphor of the Op Sys – safe to say that these elements have already embedded themselves quite literally into the mechanics of our culture. Windows and Unix to a very great extent have hard coded themselves into the highways and byways of the culture. Change that! And then change the hundred thousand years or so of very deeply rooted non-digital software! I fear I am skirting on cynicism here, an attitude I personally abhor. Yet, not wanting to end on that cynical note, if we are deadly serious about making real changes, those deadly serious obstacles need to be faced square on. One factor is scale: small changes or small groups would be more susceptible than large, in my opinion.
Phil, If your kid came down with cancer, you wouldn’t call draining your bank account trying to save her ambitious, would you? This isn’t ambitious.
We don’t need to change all of our software (culture). It’s more like tweaking it here and there–where it’s relatively easy–and seeing what benefits we can achieve.
The goal here isn’t changing software/culture. It’s changing the world–or better said–enabling humanity to change the world. You’re right that starting small is easier. For a long time I’ve focused mainly on changing myself.
If you think changing the software is difficult, think of how much easier it is than changing the hardware. The whole point is that having been blind to our software (culture), we’ve always focused on our hardware. Reinventing culture is soooo much easier than what we’ve been trying to do.